


On Wednesday, we wear pink (and do lunch).

by jenna_thorn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, CoulsonLives, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:05:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3813328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wednesday, Pepper and Natasha do lunch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Five Guys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beadslut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beadslut/gifts).



World crises don’t obey a calendar and have no respect for appointments, but when she’s not otherwise occupied, Natasha rather enjoys having plans, even if some of them are made to be broken. She will never go to the ballet with Clint, but it’s their common signal for needing to be unavailable for other people, and, sometimes, from each other. 

Some are situational; the day after a mission is downtime for medical or gym time. Either the docs need to make sure her body works or she does, if they don’t. 

Others are calendar based. Mondays are for housecleaning: physical space, email, the personal intelligence drop boxes SHIELD is aware of (the ones they don’t know about are for Thursdays), gathering the detritus that Clint scatters behind him like mud and throwing it into his locker to moulder there instead of in her space.

Wednesdays, Natasha and Pepper do lunch. That had started when Natalie worked for SI, deliberately scheduling a 12:30 to 1:30 slot for Pepper to be otherwise occupied. It’s a trick common enough for Clint to know of it, but it’s effective, and if most of their lunches were sandwiches or cafeteria salads in Pepper’s office, working silently, that was sensible for CEO and PA. 

But Natasha is not, and never was, Pepper’s employee, so when Tony relocates and drags his known world -- Pepper in the private jet, the ‘bots in a trailer behind an over-engineered sportscar, Rhodes via DC -- with him, the email in her SHIELD account is ... not unwelcome, but a bit unexpected. 

Natasha heads up to Pepper’s office with a pastrami on rye and a salad. She offers both, and Pepper cuts the sandwich in half with the flimsy plastic knife from the bag, hands the half to Natasha, then dumps half the salad on the greasy waxed paper in front of her. “So, New York,” she says and Pepper snorts pastrami and then flaps one hand in front of her face, muttering, “Ow ow ow.”

The next Wednesday is sushi and a in-depth discussion of the lunatics at DARPA with brief asides of the idiots at the JSRC and the morons at AFRL and no names, ever, are mentioned, because research labs are research labs and StarkTech is in demand. Natasha mentions that Stark’s head of R&D isn’t wholly house-trained himself and Pepper points a chopstick at her threateningly. “No, no, _next week_ , those guys are in the right and protecting humanity and national security and whatever, and Tony’s in the wrong. This week, they’re all idiots.” Natasha grins and cedes the point.

The next Wednesday, or more precisely mid-day Tuesday through midnight, local time Thursday, Natasha is chasing, running from, shooting, or being shot by the police forces of two neighboring countries and a third that doesn't share a border with either. 

She’s in Medical the next Tuesday night into Wednesday morning when she’s able to dump the mission specific burner phone and unlock her own. She sends a note to Pepper first, then loses herself in reliving the previous week, propping a tablet against the cast on her ankle for cross referencing against the laptop listing on the rails on the bed. She’s mostly done, proofreading for names and numbers when Pepper appears with a brown bag in one hand. “I understand that injury recovery requires higher than normal caloric intake,” Pepper says as she pulls two cardboard cups of fries out of the bag, then a paper wrapped burger. The paper is encouragingly grease stained and Natasha smiles a little too widely, but she could blame exhaustion. She doesn't know what Pepper’s excuse is.

Natasha eats a quarter of the burger and a scant handful of fries before deciding to stop if she wants to keep any of it down. “Sorry,” she says, as Pepper re-wraps the burger and dumps what’s left of her own lunch back into the bag. “I’m not going to be much of a conversationalist.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” Pepper answers. “I’m going to rant about Fury, so it’s not like you need to be awake.” She sits down by the bed, kicks off her shoes and starts, “So, the reflectors, right…?”

The next Wednesday, they go out for pho.


	2. Date night

Eventually the definition of lunch broadens; there are days that lunch is tea and watercress and sitting in chairs as beautiful women model next season’s dresses. Or it’s side by side seats and maroon nail polish with foam spacers between their toes and made up conversations in fake accents filled with cousins with off-the-book second jobs and what Uncle Maury did at the last holiday dinner, each trying to get the other to crack up first. Natasha usually wins. But not always. Pepper’s grand tale of imaginary Uncle Maury at the zoo, unlocking cages to get to his dropped watch reminded Natasha when Clint hid a weapons cache in a drug kingpin’s extensive garden, then, during the daytime retrieval, being nonplussed at just how loud peacocks could be. 

Then there’s the day they are in New Jersey because Pepper’s spending the afternoon at Northrup Grumman and Natasha’s heading to an undisclosed location that might or might not be Canada, eating adequate gyros with exceptional fries and Pepper is texting Happy to pick up breath mints, because there’s no way she’s missing out on finishing off the tsatziki, when the front window explodes inward and four guys in black tactical suits roll in, followed by a woman in an expensive suit and cheap shoes. 

Natasha drops two, but the woman grabs the kid behind the cash register and presses the muzzle of a handgun Pepper can’t immediately identify to his ear.

“You’ll come with us, because otherwise …”

Pepper raises her hands to shoulder height as the two remaining henchmen circle behind them. Pepper glances back at Natasha, who stands, hands out as though she could pretend to ever be unthreatening, and tries to beam a plan into her brain directly. To her astonishment, it seems to work. Natasha nods and Pepper says, as she walks forward, “There’s no reason to take any other hostage; you’ve got me, and that’s who you want, isn’t it?”

The woman shoves the cashier away and grabs Pepper’s jacket. Pepper thinks of the months of hand to hand training she’s gone through, Happy teaching her grapples and holds, Clint and Natasha grabbing and throwing her, teaching her to roll and run. She could break and evade, but she doesn’t. She even steps closer, as the cashier crawls away, to let her attacker wrap one arm across her collarbone and press the weapon up into her hair. Pepper takes a slight step backward, closer in, to hide the movement as she nods at Natasha. 

Pepper throws her right hand up to engage with the weapon, then lets Extremis flare from both hands. The gun melts in her hand, and the woman behind her gasps, then screams as her clothes ignite. She falls away backward at the same time the remaining two henchmen near Natasha do, so Pepper goes to one knee to pat out the lines of small fires dotting the dress of her weeping would-be assailant. 

“Hands in front,” Pepper says, and the woman, wide-eyed and shivering, obeys promptly, holding them up for Natasha to secure with what were decidedly not standard cuffs. “Do you always carry those?” Pepper asks.

Natasha shrugs. “Date night.”


	3. Four tickets for hockey

Coulson maneuvers with the apologetic stutter-sideways-step common to all sports venues with crowded seating, ticket in one hand, flimsy plastic cup of beer in the other, expecting to meet an informant per his properly transmitted and authorized orders. He blinks in shuttered dismay but doesn't pause when he sees his empty seat, and more importantly, the two seats in front of it, occupied by a quietly glaring man in a Sharks jersey and his rowdy girlfriend. He's SHIELD, he's trained, he doesn't consider turning and walking away because this... this is necessary and eventually, this is better. So he continues, muttering sorry, sorry to people who don't care, and then to people who do, the couple in front of his assigned seat, the people for whom he would die, for whom he did die, for whom he would kill. To whom he did lie. Clint's staring into his beer while Natasha's screaming creatively at the plexiglass, and Coulson sighs as he sits because this is early in his recovery and his ribs and shoulders still ache.

The scar tissue on his chest makes bending difficult still, and he is carefully aware of it as he leans forward and asks “Public place?” Clint leans back and answers, “You’re still going to be wearing a beer at some point, so you know. Probably mine.”

“Okay," Phil says, because all things considered, that’s about right and as he leans back in his seat, he notices that Natasha has her hand over Clint’s and he reaches forward, not even needing to stretch because these stadiums really are made to pack as many butts in one space as possible, and squeezes Clint’s shoulder, once, possibly a little too hard, then he lets go. “Should I even ask –“ he starts, but someone’s trying to get past him and he awkwardly tries to push up on the armrests to give the newcomer as much room as possible but that hurts, sternum to back, so he flops ungracefully back down and holds his breath. An apology on his lips, he looks up, past the dubious nachos and bottled beer to meet Pepper’s eyes. “Oh, well yes.”

He relaxes back into his seat, one hand coming up on automatic to rub at his chest and her eyes soften as she sits. 

“How badly are you hurt?” Pepper asks. Natasha finishes her tirade with an aggravated huff and drains her water bottle. Clint's glaring at the scoreboard. 

He knows all three of them are focused entirely on him as he answers, “Not enough to justify hurting all of you.”

**Author's Note:**

> The summary is the prompt, but I mis-read it. She meant _Wednesday Addams, Pepper Potts, and Natasha Romanov do lunch._
> 
> Oh, _that_ comma.
> 
> I wrote a bunch of words anyway. Hope you enjoyed reading them.


End file.
